Slideshare uses cookies to improve functionality and performance, and to provide you with relevant advertising. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to the use of cookies on this website. See our User Agreement and Privacy Policy.

Slideshare uses cookies to improve functionality and performance, and to provide you with relevant advertising. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to the use of cookies on this website. See our Privacy Policy and User Agreement for details.

I want to talk about the real time space which is almost a by product of social media What were seeing emerge currently I think have long term societal effects Business models and practices that have seemed normal through the twentieth century may fall away to be replaced by new notions of value

and that’s not a bad thing if books as ridiculous as this become history, books talking about dominating audiences within personal and conversational media

and the ridiculous and unsustainable consumerist arms race that has given us the six blade razor fuelled by mass media advertising I don’t think advertising is the route to monetising this space I personally want more and different

I’ve had enough of this zombieconomy, which Umair Haque so eloquently talks about a world where advertising is the desired modus operandi of a communication medium is to me a world which is entirely wedded to the conceit of unsustainable economic growth at the expense of moral and environmental wealth

this is some of what I’d like businesses that have the possibility to turn themselves inside out and find new value in what they have charities which can mould themselves into the likenesses of their supporters manufacturers who can make things only when they have enough orders to make them worthwhile and an environment when the data which is beginning to float around us and surround us, which at first seems to almost be a waste product of our digital lives will be used to improve services and we need to find new business models built around the value of the stream itself rather than ones which use the stream as a location to place adverts to sell something

we’re creating enormous amounts of data at the moment, collectively through social software. more than any publisher or broadcaster ever could and for a programmer like me there are an enormous amount of wonderful things called APIs, sort of websites made for computer programs to read and remix the data and possibility that they contain where we can stack up data and utility and algorithms like computational lego it’s a very profound change, it puts true value into having access to data

and it’s powered by something simple and profoundly changing itself. For me, this collection of things we call social media is all about making impersonal things, such as city life, personal again and giving people a voice to express themselves

and if you deconstruct it far enough, your social graph of friends and your actions and activities within it look a lot like a village. Albeit a village which exists within your environment with inhabitants strewn around the world a village with you as its fulcrum or pivot

When you look at social media on a vast scale from a distance you can see that it broadly divides into 3 intertwined and interrelated components, communities of purpose, identity and social graph and real time data

Communities of purpose, places where people create, share, comment, curate around issues, brands or subjects Ever increasingly these communities provide content for real time streams and tincorporate third party identity systems through simple to use technologies such as Facebook Connect

which allows users to use their curated identity seamlessly in other sites, reducing the friction to sign up and in many cases in itself providing real time content into the stream which is then published back out through these APIs as firehoses of intent

if you take a step back from that village, you pull away from it in a sort of Google maps zoom out, what you see is not the village or people but sentiment, clouds of feelings about things, be they people, or links or organisations or companies or products. and it is this real time stream which is slightly harder to get your head around but is of massive import

This was the fascinating sentiment view of the world at about 12pm the day after Alan Rusbridger told his followers that The Guardian was gagged with a super injunction preventing it from reporting on parliament. What is wonderful to me here is that in amongst the outrage and the sentiment are mentions not only of what The Guardian couldn’t point at in the names of organisations like Carter Ruck and Trafigura, but also the presence of the words toxic, dumping and minton, referring to the secret Minton report that The Guardian couldn’t mention which discussed the tragic effects and damage to the Ivory Coast from the dumping of toxic waste. A light had been shone and people could search and link and broadcast and amplify

Tom Coates said it best We live in the age of point at things. Everyone can be a micro-broadcaster, everyone potentially has their own amplification network of friends. And when this is combined with a massive information store it has huge implications in the world of investigation and discourse.

Wired said it all

it is a medium which has flocking, it is as Mark Earls points out the sort of herd behaviour we’d expect, we are after all herd animals

what can be made out of flocking intent data, some fascinating early examples are about place

and my feeling is that the real-time web is even more exciting in some ways when data is generated as a byproduct of an action. Because it is generated subconciously it often has a lot of meaning, it’s true. last.fm is a classic example of this but there are some interesting things emerging around cities and geography

and about treating all of the sensors we carry with us such as our phones as part of a nervous system for the built environment

this statement is true of all of us and we’re now able through our devices and through services which exist to update our time/space/sentiment at any moment but often we’re scared of giving out our exact location, we feel bad things may happen (and they may) and we fear an erosion of privacy using your location just to send a local offer of 5p off a big mac at the store near by would be a lazy and short termist use of this amazing data feed which can improve our built environment, it would annoy users and they’d not want to play for long

but interesting things starting to happen when you treat things as if they are people and anonymise people as if they are things. anthropomorphosation is fascinating and it points the way to when we are more accepting about sharing time and place in the way that we already seem to be becoming about sharing our feelings this photo was taken out of a window of a plane on my way back from Sweden last week, the big blocks of light are towns, the small blobs are ships

and ships can talk data, they can tell a service where they are which gives us information about how far from port they are, how busy shipping lanes are, imagine for a moment that people’s devices if anonymised could do the same things in cities

you could use it as the digital equivalents of cow paths to show routes through built environments

Jer Thorp in Canada is doing interesting visual analyses of Twitter, mining it for saying good morning around the world and what happens alongside those hellos

and looking at migratory patterns discernable through twitter, looking for the phrases “arriving at” and then looking for a default home location of that user to map air travel

and Dopplr created an inaccurate and incomplete vision of a map of the world simply from looking at the cities to which people travelled where the continents start emerging out of data never made for mapping

once you start noticing these approximations of maps it’s interesting to see how oftent they start appearing, I noticed this one when setting up a game which has gaining data at it’s core

a simple treasure hunt where you place physical stickers in the real world and tell people to collect them by SMSing the number in that they see

generates an activity stream in time and in space

which because you know where the stickers are allows you to analyze on a simplistic level people’s routes through a festival

some of you may play Foursquare or Gowalla, it’s interesting that BART is joining up with Foursquare to try and encourage ridership, to game use of public transport, they are more than likely trying to analyze it too

there’s also a fascinating flip side where you can get objects to talk for you when you can’t do it, Lufthansa has set up a service where you can associate yourself with a flight and it can then update your friends as to where you are

I was interested recently to think of myself as a thing which generates data, ironically this was how I spent a recent holiday (I clearly need to get out more, but I had a really relaxing holiday too) I created a new twitter identity so I could tell the story semi-anonymously, packed a big bag of kit and went off to Austria to walk for four days armed with lots of devices which could tell the stories of my walks

I created this web site which gave people information on the set of walks I was going to do to raise money for charity, a wonderful crowd sourced people centred charity called Childs I which I’m a volunteer for For each day I told the story of my walk through words

and pictures

and especially data... I created a little Android app which could send my GPS location back to a server and you could see exactly where I was at any point in time I so want to play with a firehose of data like the marathon or the Olympics now I want the data that comes from every runner to automatically update their supporters who in turn can send them messages of encouragement and just for one day I want to use the feeds of data from cctv cameras to record the journeys that these people go on so they can replay their personal adventure

as Matt Locke from Channel 4 points out, data+time = story

I was very touched when Tom Watson wrote this

I kind of opened up my holiday and although I wanted peace and tranquility and solitude, friends and people I’d never met before alike followed along and in some cases donated to the charity and at the very least learnt a bit about it I actually got something like augmented solitude, something not quite the same, but beautifully different, it’s what occurs in the new stream enhanced world

so coming back to what I said at the start, businesses are starting to turn themselves inside out such as The Guardian making its content available to developers seeing intrinsic value in the raw materials of the newspaper rather than the physical object or its digital facsimile

companies like threadless are accepting product designs from the community and then only putting them into production when enough people want to buy them and listening constantly and innovating with their community

and charities are forming themselves out of their supporters like the fabulous Childs I, lowering costs and increasing engagement treating them not just as units of money or help but telling stories about their efforts I could have waxed lyrical about Amanda’s work with Twestival here too

and the left over data from the real time web is starting to tell us about the world we live in telling us new things and unexpected things and important things

and underneath it all our friends make sense of the world of information both at the microcosm and the macrocosm

Chris Thorpe - Social Media '09 (a mashup* event)

1.
On the horizon of a real-time networked society Chris Thorpe http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaggeree/ On the horizon of a real-time networked society Jaggeree /think /help /create /work

2.
On the horizon of a real-time networked society Chris Thorpe http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaggeree/ On the horizon of a real-time networked society Jaggeree /think /help /create /work